The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released a special report on Contacts between Police and the Public in 2005 [313 KB PDF]. Each year, about one in five people in America have an encounter with a police officer, mostly in traffic stops.
There’s lots of interesting information in the BJS’s series of “police […]

One thing that people have worried about when they consider public legal education is that it will cause people to realize they have legal issues that nobody’s available to help with. In fact, I was worrying about that just the other day. In the past and still today, even legal aid organizations oppose […]

I’ve posted about government public legal education (PLE) programs (”govPLE,” which can be too cautious, to the point of being unhelpful). And I’ve written, indirectly, about bar PLE when I posted about pro bono (although there’s more to say on “barPLE,” and I’ll get to that in the coming weeks). For now, though, here’s […]

The authors of a twenty-year-old international review of public legal education that I was rereading today suggest that there are three possible “systems” of public legal education:

An “operational” system, where law is written in technical language but instruments of law like contracts and court forms must be written in plain and communicative ways.
A “two-tier” system, […]

As I was finishing law school, the dean was in the process of implementing a mandatory pro bono program. Under this program, law students are required to give forty hours of service to an approved legal organization or law firm engaged in some kind of public interest or pro bono publico legal work. […]

This blog is fighting a spell of mission drift. I anticipated this in post #1 and, what’s worse, readership has been declining since the drifting began (around Christmastime). So, with this post I will put myself to work on getting back to basics: public legal education.
What took me to Canada was a curiosity: […]

Can a rule be a rule if you can’t understand what it means? American law says that it can’t. If a law is written in a way that an “ordinary person exercising ordinary common sense” cannot sufficiently understand and comply with it, that law is “void for vagueness,” says the law.
Obviously, though, this […]

It’s the run-up to Christmas (and Boxing Day!) and I’m also in the thick of a flurry of grant proposal deadlines, so the small core of regular readers I’ve earned might see a temporary decline in activity here. I won’t reduce the frequency or even the essential quality of my posts. Length and originality […]

The government itself is the biggest provider of public legal education, at least in modern first-world democracies. And when I tell people in the United States about my interest in PLE, they often think I’m talking about the drab brochures that various state and federal agencies produce. Things like these pamphlets on landlord […]

A benefit of being an Idaho lawyer is that it’s completely feasible, all by yourself, to read and digest every single new opinion issued by the state’s two appellate courts. During all of November, for instance, the Idaho Supreme Court and Court of Appeals issued a grand total of seventeen published opinions between the […]